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Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure

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231–240 of 311 posts

Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tsoris means stress or suffering. A front-page article in a major American newspaper saying that the world's pre-eminent tech incubator was pulling out of the Chinese market due to political pressure would constitute a major loss of face and, yes, cause stress within the CPC leadership. I didn't say that this would drive a policy change after the fact. Quite the opposite, it would likely result in some kind of drama…

Not the person you replied to be wow, you have no idea how little China cares.

When you say "China" do you mean the average person on the street there or the CPC leadership?

Given the number of fuerdai in elite US schools, you really don't think that the CPC leadership would care about a public spat with YC?

I'm not trying to be right here, I'm honestly curious and would be honored to be disabused of my ignorance by a more informed perspective.

Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure

#233
post #6

Chinese investment means increased pressure on tech oligopolies* to increase censorship of media critical of China. They've been branching out to increase soft influence, keep news sites and Olympic committee from recognizing Taiwan as a separate nation. Then there's what is currently going on in Hong Kong. Chinese investor cash is effectively Chinese government investment. It's not a good thing. *edit

Everyone knew that and we saw it already several times in action....

Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure

#234

It's interesting: Chinese cash is welcome in real estate and the US treasury market. What is it about startups that makes the government concerned?

As someone who has been waiting on the sidelines to buy a home for years now, I'd love to see the Chinese begin pulling cash out of our real estate market. It's said that most of this cash has pushed up prices mostly on the West coast, but I have this belief that a lot of money has trickled into almost all metro areas of the US. I can't see any other reason for home prices to be so out of whack in medium-sized US cit…

home prices have more to do with housing policy than chinese investors. Places that don't restrict housing supply don't have housing problems because enough new houses get built to where the price of housing never exceeds the cost of building the house for too long.

Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure

#235
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of Reddit, a citizen of Hong Kong had a post this morning make it to the front page giving out a bit of info about the protest. Nearly half the comments were purged by the mods. Reddit had gone down hell in the last few years, but this was something else.

Aren't all Reddit subs driven by their own moderators? Or are there core subs that are Reddit-moderated? I had a lawyer friend who liked to post in a legal advice sub, moderated by someone in law enforcement, who banned him for posting information about your rights if you're arrested.

The lion share of subs are moderated by a relative few mods. There was a post showing the graph of control recently, I found it disturbing. Unfortunately Reddit has critical mass now, I think it can survive what ever it becomes. It could lose every user who wishes it was like the first 5 years and hardly notuce. There won't be a Digg moment for Reddit.

Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, their claim can be easily falsified by a full investigation.

What is the answer if the result of said investigation is "well, we have no direct evidence"?

Then the person who did the investigation is compromised obviously

Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who just spends a lot of time in engineering slack channels, comments seem to alternate every other day on how hard or how easy it is to raise money. I've been through fund raising once (~5 years ago) as a small-time founder and can't help but believe the reality is somewhere in between gold-rush and desert.

are these public channels?

Gophers, hangops, Google Cloud Platform, to name a few.

Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure

#238

Writer of the article here. Totally get the frustrations with paywalls. Bottom line is feature stories like this take weeks, months, sometimes a year or more to produce. Sites without paywalls have to go for clicks (which are worth close to zero now that Google/Facebook gobble up most online ad budgets). If low value clicks are all you have, you end up like dailymail.co.uk. If you want high value news, you have to pa…

High value news from the news corp owned wsj? No thanks.

Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure

#239
post #224

Writer of the article here. Totally get the frustrations with paywalls. Bottom line is feature stories like this take weeks, months, sometimes a year or more to produce. Sites without paywalls have to go for clicks (which are worth close to zero now that Google/Facebook gobble up most online ad budgets). If low value clicks are all you have, you end up like dailymail.co.uk. If you want high value news, you have to pa…

I have stayed subscribed to the WSJ since you guys broke the theranos story. The non editorial sections are the best in journalism today. NYT political bias has seeped through every article wheras WSJ clearly separates political bias between editorials and news.

WSJ didn't break the story. Other people broke the story. That story was "broken" on forums all over the internet. A WSJ journalist just collated the story and wrote a book about it. And keep in mind the WSJ journalist who broke the story refused to criticize the reporters from forbes, fortune, etc who created the theranos story. I'd have more respect for John Carreyrou if he had the professionalism and morals to go after obvious bad journalism. But he chose to stand by the journalism's equivalent of the "blue wall of silence".

Lets not forget that elizabeth holmes and the theranos nonsense was built up by journalists. Lets not forget that she was the media darling of an agenda driven "journalists" who wanted to push a narrative rather than search for the truth.

Crediting the WSJ or journalists for the theranos story is like crediting an arsonist firefighters for putting out the fire they themselves set.

Lest we forget.

https://www.vox.com/2015/10/26/11620036/theranos-ceo-elizabe...

Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure

#240
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not GP, but I've pitched to a crossover fund from China and they were super seedy. On top of having a questionable website and other investments, one of the red flags was they wanted their engineers to review our source code before/without signing any NDAs or commitments.

The concept of IP rights doesn't really exist in Chinese business culture. Your source code or any other proprietary technology is fair game. I know startup founders that have raised Chinese money and not regretted it, but it's important that it be "dumb money", i.e. they give you cash and go away while you write an occasional investor update and grow the business. Active Chinese investors (i.e. anything where you gi…

> You want to be in a position where if your investors ask you for something you can just ignore them.

What reasonable investor would put themselves in that position? They're just going to give their money away and not have any say in what happens?

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